Rotter. Architects of the conflict that gripped the world for nearly fifty years, cold warriors were the men, and few women, who gave shape to the ongoing conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union from 1. They built the Cold War's institutions, forged its diplomacy, oversaw its military flare- ups and its diplomatic stand- downs, and supplied its fierce rhetoric and its silent espionage. In the West, the so- called free world, cold warriors were usually well- born and well educated. In revolutionary societies and communist countries, high class standing was no asset for a leader, so cold warriors either came from humble stock or claimed that they did. The most prominent cold warriors were men of power. Cold warriors were frequently messianic in their convictions, believing they represented the one best political, economic, and social system. They were serious men, disinclined to joke about their work and for the most part innocent even of a sense of irony about it; with the exception perhaps of their hubris, they masked their emotions, though they could never fully erase them. The Simele massacre (Syriac: Dating the end of the Cold War requires dating its beginning, which requires defining what it was about. By one reckoning, the Cold War began in the 1945. Cold warriors were often pragmatic men, able to calculate their nations' interests and if necessary to negotiate with their adversaries in order to protect those interests. Still, despite their pragmatism cold warriors contained within their bodies the cells of history and ideology that compelled them to the contest, in the belief that they were defending their nations' values or in the hope of spreading their values to others beyond their borders.
Cold warriors lived most obviously in the United States and the Soviet Union, but because the Cold War enveloped the world its warriors were everywhere. They included the presidents of the United States, from Harry S. Bush, and their secretaries of state, among them John Foster Dulles, Dean Rusk, and Henry Kissinger. Kennan, Paul Nitze, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, and elected representatives including senators William Knowland, Joseph Mc. Carthy, and Hubert H. There were members of the intelligence community (J. Edgar Hoover, Edward G. Lansdale, William Colby), prominent journalists who interpreted the Cold War to the American people (Walter Lippmann, James Reston), and theologians, among them Reinhold Niebuhr and Billy Graham, who saw the Cold War as a moral challenge to Americans. In the Soviet Union a commitment to the Cold War was necessary for the leaders who followed Joseph Stalin after 1. Nikita Khrushchev to Konstantin Chernenko. The ideologue Andrei Zhdanov was a cold warrior of the first magnitude. Soviet diplomats carried out their superiors' orders but contributed as well their own mite to the conflict; among them were the longtime foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and the ambassador to the United States Andrei Gromyko. Lavrenti Beria, head of Stalin's secret police, maintained a bloodstained vigil against all forms of Cold War heterodoxy. Outside the United States and the Soviet Union, cold warriors fought their own battles in the shadows cast by their powerful allies. Their Cold Wars were similar to the principal super- power conflict in their ideological and geopolitical purposes, but different to the extent that they were influenced by histories that preceded the Cold War and in some ways transcended it, and also different because local concerns pressed down upon a broad Cold War foundation, reshaping it as wood construction forms mold wet concrete. There were British cold warriors, among them Winston Churchill, prime minister and influential statesman, foreign ministers Ernest Bevin and Anthony Eden, and in the last decade of the Cold War, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. In Canada there was Lester Pearson (prime minister, 1. France had Charles de Gaulle (whose Cold War had an overwhelmingly Gallic flavor), South Africa Hendrik Verwoerd (prime minister 1. On the other side were Kim Il Sung of North Korea, Vietnam's revolutionary nationalist Ho Chi Minh, Walter Ulbricht of East Germany, and Cuban leader Fidel Castro. There were thousands of cold warriors; the four profiled here were selected because they represented different sides of the conflict and because, taken together, their influence spanned nearly the length of the Cold War. Joseph Stalin was dictator of the Soviet Union from the late 1. Mao Zedong led the communists to victory in China in 1. And Ronald Reagan, U. S. All of these men made decisions that had enormous consequences for the world in which they lived and for the world inherited by the next generation of leaders. Strenuous as it was to fight the Cold War, it proved even harder to unmake it. JOSEPH STALINThat Stalin came to lead the Soviet Union following Vladimir Ilych Lenin's death in 1. Stalin was a man people underestimated. He was short (five feet, four inches tall) and stocky, with a face pitted by smallpox and a left arm bent permanently by a childhood accident. He mumbled or talked so quietly that he was hard to hear; possibly he was embarrassed at his poor grasp of Russian, which he spoke with an accent. On the eve of the October 1. Stalin's colleagues on the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet wrote that he gave . There really is nothing more to be said about him. He's got will- power, and he's going to be on top of the pile some day. His family name was Dzhugashvili. His father, or the man who raised him, was a cobbler, while his mother was a domestic servant. Joseph attended local schools and was a good student, though inclined to challenge the authority of his teachers. His boyhood hero was Koba, a character in a novel called The Patricide, who battled against the forces of injustice and rewarded the downtrodden with the spoils of his victories. Joseph identified so fully with this Russian Robin Hood that he later took . Unlike Marx or Lenin he was not much good at theorizing. He understood Russian history as a narrative of triumph and tragedy and took from it the lesson that an unguarded Russia would be ripe for exploitation or worse. Russia had saved Europe from the Mongols in the thirteenth century, had stopped Napoleon in the nineteenth, and would destroy Adolf Hitler's Reich in the 1. Each of these hard- won triumphs had saved civilization. Yet it seemed to Stalin that Russia's reward for its sacrifice was to be attacked yet again; the nation was surrounded by enemies who wished for its demise. Superimposed on this view of Russia's haunted history was a particular version of revolutionary communism. Stalin believed that the revolution required a long period of incubation at home, that it would not be ready for export to other nations until it had totally transformed Russia. Agriculture must be collectivized. The state must control industry, goading factory workers to new heights of production. Art, literature, and even science ought to reflect the noble purposes of the communist state, valorizing the proletariat and refusing to indulge in bourgeois fripperies. Suspicious of Russia's neighbors, suspicious of ideological deviation, suspicious, really, of almost everyone, Stalin built by the 1. No one knows how many Soviet citizens died as a result of Stalin's agricultural policy or by his direct order. Judging the rich peasants, or kulaks, inherently selfish and therefore incompatible with the goal of collectivization, Stalin eradicated them as a class. When grain production fell short of expectations in 1. Stalin demanded more. The result was the starvation of perhaps five million Russians. Between 1. 93. 6 and 1. Stalin instituted the Terror, in which millions more of his political opponents real or imagined were deported to Siberia or executed following a show trial. On one December day in 1. Stalin and Molotov signed 3,1. A cult of Stalin developed throughout the country. Poems and songs celebrated the dictator. One of his speeches was pressed onto seven sides of a gramophone record; the eighth side contained nothing but applause. Once disclosed, the horrors of the Stalinist gulag convinced many observers that Stalin's foreign policy would proceed, by comparably brutal steps, to threaten the world with a bloodbath in the guise of revolution. There was a germ of logic to this fear. If Stalin did not hesitate to murder Russian citizens, why should he have scruples about killing foreigners? Revolutionary ideology would not respect national boundaries. The metaphors used to describe it by those who dreaded it. Certainly Stalin was opportunistic, looking for trouble spots or turmoil to exploit. He had not abandoned hope of inspiring revolution in other countries, only shelved it temporarily in favor of consolidating control at home. Yet Stalin's first concern was always the preservation of the Soviet state from invasion or erosion from without. There was much to lose. A shrewd foreign policy must, therefore, state the Soviet Union's claim to survival while nevertheless avoiding antagonizing neighboring countries that were capable of destroying the motherland. This meant, for example, that when Germany was restored to its military power under Hitler during the 1. Stalin would seek to offset German strength by finding friends among the bourgeois states that were ideologically anathema to him. When it became clear, after the Munich Pact of 1. British and French had no stomach for opposing Hitler's absorption of other countries, Stalin decided to make his own arrangement with the Germans. The result was the Nazi- Soviet Pact of August 1. Poland and the Baltic states between them. Stalin even promised that if Germany seemed in danger of losing a war, he would send a hundred divisions to the West to defend his new ally. It turned out badly for the Soviet Union, which in June was invaded by the Germans. Stalin was at first shocked into near paralysis. He fled Moscow and failed to communicate with his generals, who were desperate for instructions. But he recovered and began issuing orders. Russia would not surrender. There would be bloody battles, and many lives would be lost.
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